Schizophrenia polygenic risk score and type 2 diabetes onset in older adults with no schizophrenia diagnosis.

OBJECTIVES: An association between type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and schizophrenia has long been observed, and recent research revealed presence of shared genetic factors. However, epidemiological evidence was inconsistent, some reported insignificant contribution of genetic factors to T2DM-schizophrenia comorbidity. Prior works studied people with schizophrenia, particularly, antipsychotic-naive patients, or those during the first psychotic experience to limit schizophrenia-related environmental factors. In contrast, we controlled such factors by utilizing a general population sample of individuals undiagnosed with schizophrenia. We hypothesized that if schizophrenia genetics impact T2DM development and such impact is not fully mediated by schizophrenia-related environment, people with high polygenic schizophrenia risk would exhibit elevated T2DM incidence. METHODS: Using a population-representative sample of adults aged ≥50 from English Longitudinal Study of Ageing ( n  = 5968, 493 T2DM cases, average follow-up 8.7 years), we investigated if schizophrenia polygenic risk score (PGS-SZ) is associated with T2DM onset. A proportional hazards model with interval censoring was adjusted for age and sex (Model 1), and age, sex, BMI, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, exercise, smoking, depressive symptoms and T2DM polygenic risk score (Model 2). According to the power calculations, hazard rates > 1.14 per standard deviation in PGS-SZ could be detected. RESULTS: We did not observe a significant association between PGS-SZ and T2DM incidence (hazard ratio 1.04; 95% CI 0.93-1.15; and 1.01, 95% CI 0.94-1.09). CONCLUSION: Our results suggest low contribution of the intrinsic biological mechanisms driven by the polygenic risk of schizophrenia on future T2DM onset. Further research is needed.

Polygenic Propensity for Longevity, APOE-ε4 Status, Dementia Diagnosis, and Risk for Cause-Specific Mortality: A Large Population-Based Longitudinal Study of Older Adults.

To deepen the understanding of genetic mechanisms influencing mortality risk, we investigated the impact of genetic predisposition to longevity and APOE-ε4, on all-cause mortality and specific causes of mortality. We further investigated the mediating effects of dementia on these relationships. Using data on 7 131 adults aged ≥50 years (mean = 64.7 years, standard deviation [SD] = 9.5) from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, genetic predisposition to longevity was calculated using the polygenic score approach (PGSlongevity). APOE-ε4 status was defined according to the absence or presence of ε4 alleles. The causes of death were ascertained from the National Health Service central register, which was classified into cardiovascular diseases, cancers, respiratory illness, and all other causes of mortality. Of the entire sample, 1 234 (17.3%) died during an average 10-year follow-up. One-SD increase in PGSlongevity was associated with a reduced risk for all-cause mortality (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.93, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.88-0.98, p = .010) and mortalities due to other causes (HR = 0.81, 95% CI: 0.71-0.93, p = .002) in the following 10 years. In gender-stratified analyses, APOE-ε4 status was associated with a reduced risk for all-cause mortality and mortalities related to cancers in women. Mediation analyses estimated that the percent excess risk of APOE-ε4 on other causes of mortality risk explained by the dementia diagnosis was 24%, which increased to 34% when the sample was restricted to adults who were aged ≤75 years old. To reduce the mortality rate in adults who are aged ≥50 years old, it is essential to prevent dementia onset in the general population.

B cell-dependent subtypes and treatment-based immune correlates to survival in stage 3 and 4 lung adenocarcinomas.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Surgery and chemoradiation are the standard of care in early stages of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), while immunotherapy is the standard of care in late-stage NSCLC. The immune composition of the tumor microenvironment (TME) is recognized as an indicator for responsiveness to immunotherapy, although much remains unknown about its role in responsiveness to surgery or chemoradiation. In this pilot study, we characterized the NSCLC TME using mass cytometry (CyTOF) and bulk RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) with deconvolution of RNA-Seq being performed by Kassandra, a recently published deconvolution tool. Stratification of patients based on the intratumoral abundance of B cells identified that the B-cell rich patient group had increased expression of CXCL13 and greater abundance of PD1+ CD8 T cells. The presence of B cells and PD1+ CD8 T cells correlated positively with the presence of intratumoral tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS). We then assessed the predictive and prognostic utility of these cell types and TLS within publicly available stage 3 and 4 lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) RNA-Seq datasets. As previously described by others, pre-treatment expression of intratumoral 12-chemokine TLS gene signature is associated with progression free survival (PFS) in patients who receive treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI). Notably and unexpectedly pre-treatment percentages of intratumoral B cells are associated with PFS in patients who receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. Further studies to confirm these findings would allow for more effective patient selection for both ICI and non-ICI treatments.

Predicting type 2 diabetes prevalence for people with severe mental illness in a multi-ethnic East London population.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Prevalence of type two diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in people with severe mental illness (SMI) is 2-3 times higher than in general population. Predictive modelling has advanced greatly in the past decade, and it is important to apply cutting-edge methods to vulnerable groups. However, few T2DM prediction models account for the presence of mental illness, and none seemed to have been developed specifically for people with SMI. Therefore, we aimed to develop and internally validate a T2DM prevalence model for people with SMI. METHODS: We utilised a large cross-sectional sample representative of a multi-ethnic population from London (674,000 adults); 10,159 people with SMI formed our analytical sample (1,513 T2DM cases). We fitted a linear logistic regression and XGBoost as stand-alone models and as a stacked ensemble. Age, sex, body mass index, ethnicity, area-based deprivation, past hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, prescribed antipsychotics, and SMI illness were the predictors. RESULTS: Logistic regression performed well while detecting T2DM presence for people with SMI: area under the receiver operator curve (ROC-AUC) was 0.83 (95 % CI 0.79-0.87). XGBoost and LR-XGBoost ensemble performed equally well, ROC-AUC 0.83 (95 % CI 0.79-0.87), indicating a negligible contribution of non-linear terms to predictive power. Ethnicity was the most important predictor after age. We demonstrated how the derived models can be utilised and estimated a 2.14 % (95 %CI 2.03 %-2.24 %) increase in T2DM prevalence in East London SMI population in 20 years' time, driven by the projected demographic changes. CONCLUSIONS: Primary care data, the setting where prediction models could be most fruitfully used, provide enough information for well-performing T2DM prevalence models for people with SMI. We demonstrated how thorough internal cross-validation of an ensemble of a linear and machine-learning model can quantify the predictive value of non-linearity in the data.

Multiregional single-cell proteogenomic analysis of ccRCC reveals cytokine drivers of intratumor spatial heterogeneity.

Intratumor heterogeneity (ITH) represents a major challenge for anticancer therapies. An integrated, multidimensional, multiregional approach dissecting ITH of the clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) tumor microenvironment (TME) is employed at the single-cell level with mass cytometry (CyTOF), multiplex immunofluorescence (MxIF), and single-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) and at the bulk level with whole-exome sequencing (WES), RNA-seq, and methylation profiling. Multiregional analyses reveal unexpected conservation of immune composition within each individual patient, with profound differences among patients, presenting patient-specific tumor immune microenvironment signatures despite underlying genetic heterogeneity from clonal evolution. Spatial proteogenomic TME analysis using MxIF identifies 14 distinct cellular neighborhoods and, conversely, demonstrated architectural heterogeneity among different tumor regions. Tumor-expressed cytokines are identified as key determinants of the TME and correlate with clinical outcome. Overall, this work signifies that spatial ITH occurs in ccRCC, which may drive clinical heterogeneity and warrants further interrogation to improve patient outcomes.

High polygenic predisposition for ADHD and a greater risk of all-cause mortality: a large population-based longitudinal study.

BACKGROUND: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a highly heritable, neurodevelopmental disorder known to associate with more than double the risk of death compared with people without ADHD. Because most research on ADHD has focused on children and adolescents, among whom death rates are relatively low, the impact of a high polygenic predisposition to ADHD on accelerating mortality risk in older adults is unknown. Thus, the aim of the study was to investigate if a high polygenetic predisposition to ADHD exacerbates the risk of all-cause mortality in older adults from the general population in the UK. METHODS: Utilising data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, which is an ongoing multidisciplinary study of the English population aged ≥ 50 years, polygenetic scores for ADHD were calculated using summary statistics for (1) ADHD (PGS-ADHDsingle) and (2) chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and younger age of giving first birth, which were shown to have a strong genetic correlation with ADHD using the multi-trait analysis of genome-wide association summary statistics; this polygenic score was referred to as PGS-ADHDmulti-trait. All-cause mortality was ascertained from the National Health Service central register that captures all deaths occurring in the UK. RESULTS: The sample comprised 7133 participants with a mean age of 64.7 years (SD = 9.5, range = 50-101); of these, 1778 (24.9%) died during a period of 11.2 years. PGS-ADHDsingle was associated with a greater risk of all-cause mortality (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.06, 95% CI = 1.02-1.12, p = 0.010); further analyses showed this relationship was significant in men (HR = 1.07, 95% CI = 1.00-1.14, p = 0.043). Risk of all-cause mortality increased by an approximate 11% for one standard deviation increase in PGS-ADHDmulti-trait (HR = 1.11, 95% CI = 1.06-1.16, p < 0.001). When the model was run separately for men and women, the association between PGS-ADHDmulti-trait and an increased risk of all-cause mortality was significant in men (HR = 1.10, 95% CI = 1.03-1.18, p = 0.003) and women (HR = 1.11, 95% CI = 1.04-1.19, p = 0.003). CONCLUSIONS: A high polygenetic predisposition to ADHD is a risk factor for all-cause mortality in older adults. This risk is better captured when incorporating genetic information from correlated traits.